Mailpiece creation devices have been known for many years. The basic principle associated with these devices is to provide a machine which can automatically take a mail item (such as a letter printed on a sheet of paper or several sheets of paper, or more cumbersome or less flexible mail items, such as pens, CDs and other items that one might wish to send by post) and insert the mail item into an envelope.
Mailpiece creation devices have traditionally been very large, high production capacity installations. These mailpiece creation devices are industrial in nature and can occupy an entire room. As such, these large-scale mailpiece creation devices represent a production facility in their own right, and require constant maintenance and operation by a team of several specially trained personnel, in order to oversee their efficient operation. These large-scale mailpiece creation devices are utilised to produce a high throughput of mail items created and ready for delivery in mail shots addressed to a target audience of tens- to hundreds-of-thousands of addressees. The requirement for such a capability is usually the preserve of large commercial organisations, such as banks and utilities companies, as well as government institutions.
In order to meet the demands and requirements of these large institutions for delivering large mail shots to their target audiences, such devices have to be capable of providing a large degree of functionality, combined with high accuracy. A machine of this size and scale might typically operate in the following fashion.
Firstly, letters are printed onto blank (or letter-headed) paper as a starting material, the contents of each letter being specific to an individual addressee. The sheet or sheets which form each letter are then collated into the correct order and accumulated together at an accumulation location. The accumulation of sheets is then passed as a unitary collation through a folding mechanism, which folds the collation in a desired way (e.g., either in half or into thirds, depending on the size of envelope into which the sheets are to be inserted).
Envelopes are fed from a separate location, and are typically provided with the envelope flap in a closed position. The envelope is firstly “flapped”, to open the flap, before being transported to an insertion location, where the envelope is held with the flap open, exposing the mouth of the envelope for insertion of mail items into the main body of the envelope.
The folded collation of sheets is then inserted into the envelope, along with any secondary mail items, such as flyers, CDs, pens, etc. The envelope, with its contents enclosed, is then passed to a sealer location, where the envelope flap is closed to the main body of the envelope and sealed against it. For traditional envelopes employing gum on the flap to seal the envelope, a moistener is provided to apply moisture to the underside of the flap as it is brought to the closed position onto the main body.
Since the contents of the mail item to be delivered are specific to the intended recipient, the mailpiece formed in this manner must be correctly addressed to the intended recipient. This may be achieved either by addressing the mail items themselves, at a location that will be visible through a window in the envelope once the mailpiece has been created, or, alternatively, the envelopes themselves may then be individually addressed either by printing onto the envelope or through the application of an appropriately addressed label. In these latter cases, it is necessary to ensure that the mailpiece creation device operates to an extremely high degree of accuracy, so as to ensure that the correct mail items are delivered to the correct recipients.
More recently, smaller businesses have begun to recognise the practical cost and time saving benefits that an automatic mailpiece creation device can provide. Particularly in the case of medium sized enterprises, which might regularly need to send out mail shots to thousands or tens of thousands of addressees, the time savings that can be achieved by using an automatic mailpiece creation device can be significant, not least in terms of the number of main hours of paid time that would previously have been spent on paying employees to prepare and send such mail items.
However, medium sized enterprises typically do not need a mailpiece creation device on the scale of those used by larger corporations. In order to meet the more modest demands of such medium sized enterprises, mailpiece creation devices have been provided that typically operate with a somewhat reduced degree of functionality, as well as with a reduction of throughput capacity in terms of the numbers of mailpieces that can be created within a given time period.
Typical devices of this kind might be of the order of size of a typical photocopier, seen in most offices. These devices would usually take pre-printed sheets as the starting material, loaded into one or more paper trays. The appropriate number of sheets from respective paper trays is then collated together in order and accumulated at an accumulation location, to form a unitary mail item. The mail item thus formed would then be folded, as described above, at which stage a mail insert may sometimes be inserted into the final fold of the folding process, typically if it is desired to include some advertising literature with the mail item. Envelopes are then delivered from a separate location, flapped to open the envelope flap, and held with the flap open at an insertion location. The folded mail item is then inserted into the envelope before the envelope is closed and sealed and the mailpiece ejected for delivery.
Such mailpieces will normally either be addressed on the pre-printed mail items, the address for delivery being visible through a window in the envelope, or would need to be addressed manually, for delivery to the appropriate recipient. Mailpiece creation devices of this type will usually have a lesser degree of functionality than for the industrial sized complexes used by larger organisations, for example perhaps only be suitable for use with a limited number of different sizes of sheets of paper, and a limited number of sizes of envelope.
Most recently, customer demand has pushed for further reduction in the size of such mailpiece creation devices. In particular, developments have been made in attempting to provide mailpiece creation devices suitable for small office and home office (SOHO) use. Small offices tend to produce mail items for smaller readerships, perhaps producing mail shots of only several tens or hundreds of individual mail items for postal delivery. In order to meet the demands of such relatively smaller enterprises, so-called “desktop” mailpiece creation devices have been provided, for use in SOHO environments.
Despite their name, however, such desktop mailpiece creation devices are very much larger than, for example, a typical desktop printer, and would still be utilised as a standalone piece of equipment, for example in the post room of a substantial office building. These SOHO mailpiece creation devices have a reduced throughput capacity, and typically have a greatly reduced degree of functionality, at least in terms of the flexibility of the device to adapt to different sizes of paper or envelope. Such SOHO devices would normally be configured to collate, accumulate, fold and insert paper of one particular size into envelopes of another particular size, before sealing the envelope and ejecting it for delivery. These SOHO devices are typically also limited in terms of the number of sheets that maybe collated to form a mail item, and in terms of any ability to insert irregular sized objections into the envelope. Nevertheless, for many users the ability to quickly produce mail items on standard stationary can be beneficial, and the high throughput (relative to human mailpiece creation capacity) is often welcomed.
In spite of the growing trend in modern offices to move towards electronic communications, such as by facsimile and electronic mail, the number of postal items delivery continues to grow worldwide. This can be largely attributed to increasing correspondence between the Western and Eastern continents, as business relations around the globe continue to expand. With the continued expansion in demand for mailpiece creation devices to meet this growing postal economy, smaller users have come to appreciate the benefits of automatic mailpiece creation devices for their own work. To this end, there has been recognised a growing need for a low flexibility, yet functional and reliable, genuine desktop mailpiece creation device, suitable for use by individuals or small business, for producing limited runs of mail items to more specific target audiences.
The technical considerations that have typically stood in the way of further size reduction of existing mailpiece creation devices are due to some of the specific technical problems encountered with paper handling machines.
For example, paper is not a particularly easy material to manipulate with a mechanical device. Sheets of paper have an inherent stiffness resisting bending, which can make them difficult to advance around tight bends in a paper feed path, or to direct accurately into a desired opening. Similarly, it is desirable to produce mail items that are accurately folded at a desired location, both for aesthetic reasons, as well as to ensure that the folded mail item will fit within the mouth of an envelope.
To produce a fold in a sheet of paper at a desired point along its length, a buckle folder will often be utilised. Such folders operate by feeding a sheet along a so-called buckle chute, so that the sheet is brought to a halt at its leading edge, as it hits against a stop in the chute. As the buckle folder proceeds to feed the sheet in the forwards direction, the sheet is caused to buckle in a direction that is determined by the shape of the buckle chute and its orientation relative to the feed path along which the sheet has arrived. A pair of rollers, forming a folding nip there between, can then be positioned at the location where it is known that the buckle will form. However, the geometry of such a buckle folder is heavily dependent on the desired location of the fold in the sheet of paper, and the relative angles between the inlet feed path along which the sheet arrives and the buckle chute into which the sheet is delivered, in order to produce the buckle assuredly at the desired location.
This fixed geometry has made it difficult to reduce the size of known sheet folding mechanisms, and similar considerations apply to other component parts of a mailpiece creation device. For example, a sheet or envelope cannot be fed around a bend that is too sharp without permanently creasing or bowing the sheet of paper or envelope. Since this is generally undesirable, sheet and envelope feed paths tend to have a minimum radius of curvature which cannot be reduced further, leading to constraints in the design process.
A further consideration facing designers of sheet handling devices has involved known envelope sealing mechanisms. Typically, an envelope is fed with the flap end at the rear, so that the flap (which is initially closed but not sealed) can be opened by a suitable flapping mechanism as the envelope is fed along a feed path. The envelope is then held with the flap open at a mail item insertion location, awaiting insertion of mail items. However, in order to seal the envelope flap, the envelope must first be transported in one direction to a moistening location for applying moisture to the gum adhesive on the underside of the envelope flap, before being reverse-fed, typically around a bend, between a pair of sealing rollers, in order to close and seal the flap to the main body. This sealing process has traditionally made it difficult to incorporate non-flexible or bulky mail items into the mailpiece, as the filled envelope will not generally fit through known sealing mechanisms.
A further constraint in reducing the size of mailpiece creation devices has been the complexity of the mechanisms required in order to perform the various functions of collating and folding a mail item, delivering the mail item to an insertion location, flapping an envelope, delivering the envelope to the insertion location and holding the flap open, inserting the folded mail item into the envelope, moistening the envelope flap, sealing the envelope and ejecting the envelope from the mailpiece creation device. In order to correctly sequence each step in the mailpiece creation process, numerous motors, electronic clutches and sensors must typically be utilised, along with a fairly complex microprocessor program for overseeing the complete operation.